Wednesday ghosts

Memory, both personal and collective, is essential for the work of justice, and therefore ghosts, as the intermediaries between the dead and the living, are key figures of justice, the heralds, if you will, of a justice that can never present itself .

–Mariana Valverde

We published our newspaper every Wednesday. I arrived to the presses at 10:00 a.m. and helped the staff to manually assemble more than 2,500 copies. The reporters traveled around campus to distribute La Catarina.

“Here you go, sir. I wrote the story on page 3, please write and tell us what you think.”

One night in January, campus police forced us out of the newsroom.

One of the former editors refused to leave. I look through the window and see his foot, I realize he is shaking. Short spasms. Ninety kilograms and a Mohawk hid underneath a desk.

“Can you get him out of there?,” one of the campus police officers said. We know he wasn’t asking.

I observed the pictures our journalism teacher took that night. Said’s face is not there. He is talking on a cell phone with his back turned towards the wall. A legal representative of the university smiles.

I know Said cried underneath that desk, but I can’t remember his face.

The university returned us the newspaper, but issued no apology. We were not censored, they said, we were not forced out. It was just an office relocation and we had exagerated. A misunderstanding. That was all.

We started writing again, but we never regained our office. We would loose the paper eventually.

We tried to run it for one semester. Teachers and students refused to give interviews. They were afraid.

“Please, just 5 minutes. You won’t get in trouble for speaking about the Physics Congress. We just want to know when and where it’s going to be, the activities you have planned.”

The same thing, with every story, every week: four months. Until we were threatened.

We were planning a summer issue in June. I had finished my term as the editor in chief and I went home for the break. The university had fired more than 25 employees and accused them of planning a conspiracy to control the university. A new editor was going to publish the story. She was summoned to the president’s office. The president was not there, but his representative told her the story could not be printed. The university owns the newspaper’s name and copyright. The representative said the university would sue us if we published without its approval.

We were forcibly removed. Other students were incorporated into the newspaper. They kept the name.

Every Wednesday I saw a Catarina issue manually assembled and distributed by students.
Every Wednesday I saw people reading it.
Every Wednesday I was again sorrounded by campus police officers.
“Can you get him out of there?”

I am now two countries, 4,000 kilometers and 15 months away from January. I read a press realease from the university: “La Catarina presents ‘Caotica Ana’, a movie by Julio Menem”. I look at the date. I return, again.